Atlassian’s 2025 workplace study found that knowledge workers burn 9 hours every week – roughly a quarter of their time – just hunting for information.
Any document approval workflow that scatters comments across Google Docs, Confluence, Slack, and email is literally taxing every employee one full day per week.
Put that against an average $120 K salary and you lose roughly $27,000 per employee, per year. A 50‑person product team? That’s $1.35 million erased before a single line of code is written.
Each Interruption Costs 23 Minutes of Focus
University of California Irvine research shows it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain flow after a distraction.
In a tool‑hopping environment, three “Where’s the latest version?” pings a day add up to about 299 hours of recovery per person annually—another $7,762 per employee, or $388 K for that same 50‑person squad.
Manual Approvals Cost 3× More Than Automated Ones
Stripe’s 2024 automation report notes that automated processes run at just 33% of the cost of manual, email-driven approvals.
Labor hours, rework, and delays balloon when your sign-off chain lives in inboxes and spreadsheets.
If your team ships 250 specs a year at $1,000 in manual approval effort each, switching to automated sign‑off saves $167 K outright.
Add It Up: $1.9 Million in Annual “Bleed”
Combine information‑search waste, focus‑recovery drag, and bloated manual approvals and even a mid‑sized product org quietly burns nearly $2 million every year.
What a Modern Document Approval Workflow Looks Like
| Old Way (Fractured) | New Way (Unified) |
| Multiple versions across Docs, Confluence, Jira | Single source of truth with real-time versioning |
| Feedback hidden in email chains | Inline commenting + visible approval history |
| Manual status updates | Automated status + reminders |
| “Who owns this?” chaos | Role-based approvals baked into the doc |
5 Quick Wins to Slash Approval Time
- Map your current approval chain—spot redundant steps.
- Template recurring docs so every project starts with the right metadata.
- Automate reminders to nudge blockers without human babysitting.
- Integrate chat + tasks so questions live next to the work, not in a separate app.
- Adopt a unified workspace (hint: Artefact) to centralize sign-off, files, and comments.
Final Word (and a Gentle Pitch)
Broken documentation isn’t a “nice-to-fix” irritation—it’s a seven-figure drag on productivity. A modern approval workflow—the kind Artefact was built to deliver—turns that lost time into shipped features and happier teams.
Ready to plug the leak?
👉 Get a demo of Artefact